January 13, 2010

More Plural Life

Whether you're a Baptist, Neo-Platonist, property law professor, or average philanderer struggling to get by, forget about HBO's "Big Love" and learn something. Brooke Adams, a Salt Lake Tribune reporter, tells us almost daily about The Plural Life. Start with her piece yesterday on "Young’s Plan":

Sally Denton, in her book “Faith and Betrayal,” observes that Brigham Young “launched the most ambitious communal socialist society” in America’s history.

She could have been describing the community in Short Creek, now known as Hildale and Colorado City, and the United Effort Plan Trust when she writes about Brigham Young’s plan. This is how the UEP Trust, at least in its inception, was designed to function — and also sheds light on why the states’ efforts to reform and reorganize it have alienated FLDS residents. From Denton:

“Young decreed that there would be no private ownership of land, since it belonged to God. The harvest would be placed in communal storage for distribution according to individual needs.” And:

“. . . There would be no private ownership of property in what one of [Brigham] Young’s clerks described as this ‘place where the land is acknolwedged to belong to the Lord.’ and each man would be assigned two plots, one for a home and one for a farm. . . ."